World Bank Loan To Support Pakistan’s National Education Assessment System

WASHINGTON, June 3, 2003 --The World Bank today announced the approval of a US$3.63 million credit to support the implementation of a National Education Assessment System (NEAS) in Pakistan. The credit, a Technical Assistance Loan, supports the Government’s ongoing Education Sector Reform, which was launched by the Government of Pakistan in 2001 as part of its reform agenda, and provides a solid basis for decisions concerning resource allocation within the education sector.
The NEAS will provide guidance to teachers and their supervisors about the substantive areas that need to be emphasized within the curriculum. It will also provide households with a much better basis for gauging the value of the education being provided to their children. Consequently, as the system takes hold, appropriate use of the data it generates would result in a better quality of education for Pakistan’s children.

The National Education Assessment System seeks to determine where basic education is successful and where it is not. The Ministry of Education has testing mechanisms for assessing individual student performance, but until now it had no system of measuring how well schools were doing in implementing the curriculum and learning objectives associated with it.

“There is an urgent need to understand how much of the curricula students are learning and to be able to identify the causes of success and the causes for low performance, in order to better target future investments that might affect student learning,” said S. Ameer Hussain Naqvi, Senior Education Specialist, World Bank.

Specifically, NEAS will determine how well the curriculum is being translated into knowledge and skills among students, and identify geographic and gender-related areas of inequity in student and teacher performance. In addition, the project also looks at how to improve resource allocations to increase student performance and how to build capacity for sustainability of future assessments. It will also assist the Government of Pakistan in its efforts to increase knowledge and acceptance of assessment objectives and procedures by policy-makers, government officials, teachers, students and parents.

The Education Sector Reform foresees the adoption of mechanisms, such as the National Education Assessment System, to improve the quality and access of education in the country. This initiative is in line with the country’s Poverty Reduction Strategy and the World Bank’s Country Assistance Strategy (CAS).

The project will be implemented over a period of five years under the coordination of the Curriculum Wing of the Ministry of Education, which will oversee and monitor the implementation of the National Education Assessment System activities throughout the country and disseminate its results. The US$ 3.63 million credit, from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank's concessionary lending arm, have a 35-year maturity with a 10-year grace period and a 0.75 percent service charge.